Archives

Feeds

Posts Tagged with "East Palo Alto"

Black people are genetic experts at dislocation and assimilation; what with centuries of practice, we come to this place with authority and grief. However, Saturday, July 30, at the fifth OG or Original Good Community Barbecue, children, youth and adults had a chance to mingle, eat and enjoy the chance to introduce Gen X to those elders who made this city situated between Silicon Valley giants – Palo Alto and Menlo Park – what it was, if not what it is now.

By a 4-1 vote, the City of Richmond passed a rent control and just cause eviction law on Tuesday, July 21. A broad coalition of tenants, labor allies, homeowners and progressive community groups packed the hearing chambers as Vice Mayor Jael Myrick joined Councilmembers Jovanka Beckles, Eduardo Martinez and Gayle McLaughlin in casting the votes to pass rent control.

Rev. Jesse Jackson led a delegation to the Hewlett Packard annual shareholder meeting on March 19, calling attention to the lack of minority inclusion in Silicon Valley. He emphasized the virtual absence of African Americans in corporate boardrooms, corporate suites, financial transactions, advertising and professional services. The following day, he met with community leaders in the East Palo Alto city offices.

Typically we don’t show up to the fight until several of us have been shot. We don’t show up early on not because we don’t care, but because in general we don’t know how. That’s why Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC) is establishing a policy academy to increase civic participation by formerly incarcerated people, both locally and statewide. Our first training drew 50 people to the Watts Labor Center in Los Angeles.

Join East Palo Alto youth for the premiere of their three short documentaries: ‘Homegrown: Cultivating Dreams Through Action’ on Monday, March 18, 6:30-8:30 p.m., at East Palo Alto City Hall, 2415 University Ave. The films are about the history of urban farming in East Palo Alto, the Weeks Neighborhood vision and the activism that led to the closing of Romic, a hazardous waste facility formerly located in the city.

Arriving at Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport from cities throughout America, aspiring college students were excited. The tour would visit Spelman College, Morehouse College and Clark-Atlanta University in Atlanta, also Alabama State University and Tuskegee University in Alabama.

Generally, what happened to Harding happens in colonized spaces to colonized subjects, from Hunters Point to Baghdad. The victims are people of color. Five centuries of colonially-constructed rationales have served the purpose of minimizing the value of racialized subjects.

A sea of overwhelming opposition in cities from the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles has risen against San Mateo Assemblymember Jerry Hill and his anti-local hiring measure, Assembly Bill 356, which threatens state funding for any California city with a local hiring policy.

Assemblymember Hill today unveiled legislation that attacks local hiring by banning state-funded construction in any city with a local hiring law, even shutting down Bay Area projects that residents of his own district work on.

With unemployment at its highest in decades and 41 percent more San Franciscans requesting assistance feeding themselves and their families this year, out-of-work residents convened at City Hall to ask Mayor Newsom to sign the local hiring law that a super-majority of the Board of Supervisors passed last week.

This year marks the 11th Annual Community Giveback – an event where bikes, toys and gifts will be given to children; but they are not the average kids. Eleven years ago a group of formerly incarcerated people, with the help of prisoners, started to give away bikes to the children of incarcerated parents.

The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) predicts a 16-inch mid-century sea level rise, covering Bay Area coastal lands and eventually swamping downtown San Francisco up to Market Street. The primary global warming gas is carbon dioxide. Methane gas, heavily implicated in global warming, has been emitted for years from the Bayview Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Sea level rise will release methane gas from wetlands and landfill, of which much of Hunters Point is composed.

On Thursday, Sept. 3, at their weekly town hall meeting, the leaders of SLAM (Stop Lennar Action Movement) reminded the audience of the kind of power they have in the battle to save Bayview Hunters Point. Minister Christopher Muhammad, Archbishop Franzo King and Francisco Da Costa shared the latest news of SLAM’s progress and urged the audience to understand that by staying focused and vigilant and not letting anything turn them around, they will win the war.

It’s been 33 years, but Ed Donaldson can still see the anxious look on his mother’s face when she was told she had to move. It was 1976, and Donaldson was only 10 – the youngest of three children – when the family received word from the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency that they were being kicked out of their Hunters Point apartment.

With the landslide victory of Barack Obama, there are segments of our society who feel racism is a thing of the past. Thankfully, we have tyrants in positions of power like Palo Alto Police Chief Lynne Johnson to keep everything in proper perspective.